Kazuko Matsumoto

The role of social networks in the post-colonial multilingual island of Palau: Mechanisms of language maintenance and shift

Abstract This paper aims to reveal mechanisms of language maintenance and shift in the rural post-colonial multilingual island community of Palau in the Western Pacific, using social networks as an explanatory framework. I explore the usefulness of social networks from three perspectives, investigating whether and how social networks can explain changes in the use of former colonial languages in a post-colonial community; the functions of strong and weak ties in a multilingual community; and the social characteristics of communities in which social network as an analytical tool may have an explanatory force. Methodological and theoretical issues involved with the concept of social network are also scrutinised. With some cautions about the limits to the explanations made possible by network analysis, I conclude that the social network is indeed a valuable and important social variable in sociolinguistic investigations, alongside other factors, such as sex and identity.

Investigating the sociolinguistic gender paradox in a multilingual community: A case study from the Republic of Palau

The focus of this article is the supposed “Gender Paradox,” proposed by Labov(1990,2001), which suggests that women are both sometimes conservative and sometimes innovative in terms of linguistic variation and change. Here we explore the paradox from two perspectives: we in vestigate both its applicability to multilingual as opposed to multidialectal communities as well as question whether the paradox is methodological or real. Although much sociolinguistic research on the paradox has been on macro studies of men versus women in monolingual multidialectal communities, this paper presents quantitative analyses supplemented by in-depth ethnographic observation and data collection in a multilingual Japanese-Palauan community of the Western Pacific. What is more, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the “conservatism” and “innovation” of women in the community under scrutiny is represented by the use of the very same language—Japanese. For older Japanese-Palauan women, the greater use of Japanese represents adherence to their heritage language. Among younger Japanese-Palauan women(most of whom are bilingual in Palauan and English), however, the use of Japanese represents a change to wards a language highly valued in the economy as essential for the promotion of tourism and trade. Since our results demonstrate that the effects of gender on language behavior may appear in differences within sex groupings, we conclude that the paradox is methodological, rather than real, and is a result of the distillling of gender down to binary male-female categories of analysis, rather than investigating the complexity of gender more qualitatively. Our ethnographic analysis of multilingual data from Palau presented here demonstrates that function as well as form are important in understanding seemingly paradoxical examples of language shift, as well as highlighting the need both for further research on the effects of gender in multilingual communities and the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis in studies of language change.

Palau: Language Situation

This article looks at the language situation in the Republic of Palau, which is located in the Western Pacific Ocean. We first consider the languages regarded as indigenous to this group of islands before looking at the other, nonlocal languages used there. Owing to a century of rule by a number of colonial powers as well as recent immigration, Palau is a relatively diverse multilingual and diglossic nation-state.